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WHEELING – “You can’t shake hands with the devil, and say you’re only kidding.” That’s the line that came to mind when I read about an effort by West Virginia Democrats to help Don Blankenship become the Republican nominee for US Senate by running ads attacking his competition. The scheme has awful risks, and a huge downside even if it “succeeds.”

WHEELING – During the Civil War, flags on the battlefield had enormous tactical and strategic importance. Regimental flags allowed soldiers to know the position of their units, and which direction they should be moving to keep up with it.

WHEELING – From ancient times until the late 1800s, physicians believed in bloodletting as a treatment for all kinds of diseases. Doctors and scientists thought that blood carried what they called “humours” that got out of balance in sick people, and that pouring out some of the blood would balance them and cure the disease. Sometimes leeches were used. We know now that this thinking was wrong and that intentionally bleeding a patient usually hurts and can even kill.

WHEELING -- Act I flashes back to Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, as he declares that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Thirty-six years later, his words continue to reverberate.

WHEELING – A political party that stops listening to its voters is like a person who has stopped breathing. For a short time, nothing seems to change. But it gets uncomfortable quickly, and then unbearable. That is how the West Virginia Democrats find themselves after 2016: suffocating.

WHEELING – The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that the phrase “equal justice under law” be engraved on the west pediment of its courthouse in 1932. Derived from our Fourteenth Amendment, those words solemnly promise that our legal system will dispense justice without regard to race, religion, or national origin. Every lawyer swears to uphold our constitution, and its sacred guarantee of equal justice.